Accessibility and Web Standards

Eight years ago everyone with a text editor and a web browser were generating web pages and showing them to the world.

"Badly formed" page syntax and structure was tolerated by browsers, leading to a huge proliferation of poorly structured sites - This had nasty side effects when those browsers were upgraded, or changes needed to be made to the site, causing unpredictable results.

As the web exploded, so did the number of add-ons and plug-ins that could be added to a site, each making users more frustrated and slowing the web to a crawl. Browsers were incompatible with each other and so users were encouraged to keep upgrading and switching their software.

Web sites are now coming of age

  • Web Standards have been clarified and enhanced, with best practice implementation drawn from early web experience.
  • Accessibility guidelines help to enable sites to become available for all, regardless of browser technology, physical impairment or access device.
  • Accessibility is now also a legal requirement.

Making the web better

Separating style from content with stylesheets (CSS) not only aids accessibility, but means that making site-wide changes is much more simple, and ensures design consistency.

Server-side scripting is used to make sure dynamic web pages work on all browers - not just a chosen few.

All our sites are designed using CSS/HTML/XHTML and validated to W3C web standards and available accessibility guidelines.

This site will look much better in a browser that supports web standards, but it is accessible to any browser or Internet device.